Operation Bamboozle (24 page)

“Italian-Americans got a bad name in this country,” Vito said. “Time we stood up to be counted. I'm as patriotic as the next guy.”

“I feel bad about even talking so much,” Luis said. “I'm swimming in deep waters. You're under no obligation to dive in. Quite the reverse.”

Before he left, Vito picked out twenty nudes and had them stashed in his car. “Tell Uncle,” he said. “Uncle will pay.”

They all stood in the crisp night air and waved goodbye.

“I'm famous,” Stevie said. “He thinks I'm beautiful.”

“You've always been beautiful,” Princess said. “And you've always been dumb. Nothing's changed, kid.”

“Vito's got real class,” Stevie said confidently. “He liked the dimples in my butt. Ain't that classy?” Nobody argued.

Julie waited until Stevie and Princess had gone inside. “Please tell me that patriotic crap was all bullshit,” she said.

“D'you think he believed it?” Luis said.

“Part of him
wants
to believe it. The part that's six years old and just learned to rollerskate.”

“If he believes it, then it's true.” He put his arm around her. She put her arm around him and pinched so hard that he cried out.

“Wake up, Luis. This isn't working the Swiss clinic con with old ladies. This is bullshitting guys who kill people if they split an infinitive.”

“Swimming in deep waters,” he said. “That was a good line.” They went in.

Jerome Fantoni kept grinding, so his cousin, Gabriel Hartz the dentist, had a rubber mold made for him, something like a boxer's gumshield only much bigger. He wore it at night and it worked. His jaws didn't ache so much in the morning. His teeth made rows of little holes in the rubber. When it was in place, the thing made him look like an old, tired clown. He didn't care. Some days that's how he felt. Then he had a vivid, pointless dream and woke up in blackness to find that he had bitten clean through the rubber. His jaws didn't want any breakfast.

He drank coffee with a shot of bourbon for nutrition, and telephoned Agent Fisk.

“You're the Bureau of Investigation. I pay my taxes. So investigate this. Last night, big dream. Good, bad, I dunno, you tell me. I'm on Fifth Avenue, selling peanuts, for Christ's sake. Took me five days to get there. Five days. Why? Mystery. But there I am, shouting
Peanuts! Peanuts!
like a maniac. Nobody's buying. It's all a waste of time. Waste of peanuts too.” He suddenly remembered more: young women, stark naked, laughing at him. “The rest is unimportant, just trivia.”

“I'm not an expert in this field, sir.”

“I'm not a peanut vendor.”

“But I did a psychology course at Southern Cal. I think we are all peanut vendors, sir.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Dreams disguise the unspeakable. When you shout
peanuts
over and over again, what does it sound like?
Peanuts peanuts peanus peanus penis.”
Fantoni was too shocked to speak. Fisk said: “Five days is what it would take you to travel by train to California, where your daughter Stephanie is preparing to marry Vito DiLazzari II. Perhaps not with your blessing. On the one hand, the fruit of your loins. On the other hand, a waste of peanuts.”

“That's the most asinine thing I've ever heard,” Fantoni said. He could feel a fast pulse pounding in his temple.

“The subconscious has a sly sense of humor, sir. Or so they told us at Southern Cal.”

Fantoni slammed the phone on its cradle and trapped his fingers. He sucked his knuckles. He dragged open a desk drawer and took out a picture postcard of an angry rattlesnake.
Getting wed,
the card said.
Vito DiLazzari II. Stay away. Stevie.
“Peanuts to you, lady,” he said, and then heard his own words. “I didn't mean that,” he said. Now he was apologizing to a daughter who was three thousand miles away. Asinine.

The day after Stevie and Vito got engaged, Uncle telephoned her. “Vito's mother wants you should have tea,” he said. “My advice, wear something simple. Also she's deaf. Don't hear good. So just smile and nod. Her chauffeur will call.”

Stevie went out with Princess and bought a dark blue velvet gown, three inches below the knee, no cleavage. “Very daring for 1905,” Princess said. Julie approved too. “She's gonna check your credentials, so don't goose the butler and don't say shit.”

“She'll want to play gin rummy,” Luis said. “Don't win, but don't lose too much. She wants you innocent but not stupid.”

Mrs. DiLazzari lived high in the hills of Pasadena, in a ranch house whose exterior was tiled in what looked like black marble. The front door opened on a lifesize statue of a man in white marble. He wore a slight smile, and his right arm seemed to be welcoming the guest. Stevie was startled. “The late Mr. DiLazzari,” the maid explained. “The son wanted a gun in his hand, but he lost out. Follow me, please.”

They went to a large livingroom where flowers and potted shrubs occupied every raised surface and much of the floor. Vito's mother was wearing a kaftan in floral colors. She was
short and stout, and she began speaking as soon as Stevie came in, booming, as many deaf people do when they hear themselves so poorly. “Sit down, my dear, there will be tea shortly, I take it you drink tea, I never do, this little pink flower is a rock rose, very pretty but I have to keep dead-heading it, plants demand one's constant attention …” As she spoke, she wandered. Uncle had been right. Stevie smiled and nodded. After three minutes she saved the smile and cut down on the nodding.

Tea came, the maid served it, Mrs. DiLazzari went on booming and wandering. Stevie sipped her tea and wished it was a whiskey sour. Better yet, a champagne cocktail. The Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Plaza had a barman called Jack who made terrific champagne cocktails. Sixty-five stories up. Best view in all Manhattan. You could see way down into the Village. That place on Bleecker, Mori's club, had a hot little band. Nothing like it in LA. You could jump in a New York taxi and cross town in twenty minutes. Not in LA. Takes half a day to cross LA. “Be kind to Vito,” Mrs. DiLazzari rasped. “Be gentle with my boy. He's had a very sheltered life. People say cruel things about a virgin.”

“About a
what?”
Stevie said, before she remembered: deaf. She put down her teacup, got up, moved closer to the old lady. “You raised your son to be a
what?”

“Not that he hasn't had girl friends,” Mrs. DiLazzari said. “Too greedy, all of them. Too demanding. They didn't understand the physical thing, didn't realize Vito's a very spiritual person. He told me his body is a sacred shrine. There's a lot of his father in Vito, and Mr. DiLazzari had no time for extramarital sex.”

“So we don't get married,” Stevie said, just to hear her own voice. “Then it's not extramarital.”

“Fornication is for animals. His father was a busy man. No room in his mind for idle pleasures. Vito takes after him.”

The chauffeur returned her to Konigsberg. Julie asked how the velvet dress had scored. “The whole goddamn family stinks of purity,” Stevie said. “I told her, I married three failures, I got more purity than Doris Day.”

“Oh, steady on,” Luis said.

“I could use a beer,” Stevie said. Julie opened a bottle for her. “His ma reckons Vito never lost his cherry,” Stevie said. “Totally intact. Too busy playin' with his Plasticene. Keeps his dick in his hip pocket.” She drank deeply.

“Never despair,” Luis said. “One day Vito will reach for a handkerchief. ‘Hello!' he'll say. ‘This looks interesting!' and soon—”

“Vito's problem, his thumbs are too short,” Stevie said. “You noticed that? Short thumbs, an' he wears his pants too tight. Ain't healthy.”

“You'd find hot sex in a dead penguin,” Julie said.

Princess had been watching Stevie. “That pissed-off look,” she said. “That's good, I can paint that.”

“Draw some blood while you're at it,” Julie said.

A week passed. Ten days.

A couple of times, Julie drove around LA, looking for the kind of church that Vito might like. The smog was back, and the city sprawled. All its energy went into spreading, none into growing: mostly it was a two-story town, a bungalow town. She had a great desire to be back in Manhattan. The hell with it. She drove home.

Luis traveled a lot. Often he was in Washington DC, or so he said. “You hate that place,” Julie told him, and he agreed. “A man has to do what a man has to do,” he said.

“That's crap. You can't do self-sacrifice, Luis. Never could. Okay, forget it, I don't care what you're up to, it's bound to be bullshit.”

“How that hurts. But my shoulders are broad.”

Stevie spent a night at Hungerford Manor, didn't like it, too cold, came back to Konigsberg. “The man is a perfect gentleman,” she said. “Never laid a finger on me.”

“Tough luck, kid,” Princess said. “Back to work. Drop your pants before this paint dries.”

Hancock read the obits and made notes. He bought a street map of LA and stuck pins in it. But that's as far as he went.

Meanwhile, the FBI bugged Konigsberg. Sometimes the talk was about DiLazzari, sometimes Vito himself phoned Luis. Those transcripts got redflagged. Agent Moody copied parts of them to Fisk and asked if they rang any bells. Fisk thought about it, and called LA.

“Words don't necessarily mean what they seem,” he said. “For instance, you say DiLazzari mentions Cabrillo's financial empire, but he could be joking. Could mean a hot-dog stand.”

“And Vito wants a share? I can't see that,” Moody said. “Cabrillo tells him it's secret. Says it's a very risky way to make a buck. We don't have that kind of hot-dog stand in California.”

Fisk looked at his notes. “Secrecy. Risk. Profit. Wall Street talks like that all the time. So Cabrillo keeps bad company. So does Sinatra. It's nothing compared with the triple-homicide bank heist we just cleared up on Staten Island.”

“In Southern California we call that a misdemeanor,” Moody said. “Saves on the paperwork. Speaking of which … A hot memo has landed on my desk. Pan Am tells me that Cabrillo is now in the air to New York. He lands at Idlewild in about an hour, 2 p.m. your time.”

“Busy man.”

“He misses your hot dogs,” Moody said. “Best in the world. Allegedly.”

Luis stepped outside of the arrival lounge and took a deep breath. He enjoyed it. There was a bite in the New York air that was missing in LA. California was too mild, too spacious. New York had no time for that crap; everyone was chasing the next dollar as if it was the last. For a moment he thought he could even smell the tang of battle. Maybe that was just aviation fuel. While he was trying to identify it a taxi pulled up and he was too slow to claim it, which just proved his point: in this city you move or you die. Then the man who beat him to it said: “Want to split the ride?”